No Dice
by selori
Summary: O'Neill gets more insight into how his 2IC's mind works when SG-1 is stuck for a few days.


Rrrrrrrp… Snap! Rrrrrrrip… Snap! Rrrrrrip…

"Carter?" O'Neill flicked the Velcro cover of his watch back with a snap. "How's today's miracle coming?" She had been giving him somewhat murderous glances for at least the last 15 minutes. He definitely hoped that conversation was a welcome change from his pacing and watch-snapping.

Major Carter sighed from where she sat under a console. "Slower than most miracles, sir," she said. The tightness around her eyes and set of her mouth that told him more than words that if she had heard that Velcro-ripping-apart sound once more, SG-1 would have been looking for a new CO, and the SGC would've needed a new second in it was, it looked like his question had mellowed her homicidal thoughts into insubordinate thoughts. That was an improvement, right?

"It's not going to take seven days is it, Carter?" he quipped.

"Six, sir," she corrected.

"What's the holdup? We're due back at the SGC in less than three hours. And, as pleasant as this place has been for the past day and a half…" A day and a half since this booby trap had sprung. Thirty-seven hours since the doors to the lab had closed behind them, sealing SG-1 in a set of rooms the size of a small apartment – say, Daniel's. Twenty-two hundred and…. and… several minutes trying to figure out how in the world – okay, on this world – to unseal the doors that seemed to have fused themselves into the walls.

"Sir, as much as I wish I could wave my magic physicist wand and get us out of here…"

"…it's just going to take time, Jack," Daniel finished for her. "It would take less time if you would leave us alone and stop pestering us."

Yep, Daniel was getting snarky all right. As long as that irritation was focused on him, however, Carter and Daniel should be able to continue working on a solution. "Sorry, Daniel, I'm just tired of sitting here doing nothing. Teal'c and I have inventoried our packs three times, we've diagrammed every wall and countertop-thingie and sketched every thing that you even thought could be a form of writing," he complained. "Next time we get trapped in someone's lab," he joked lightly to Teal'c, "remind me to bring a pack of cards."

Daniel and Carter had been like kids in a candy store when they'd discovered this complex, and Carter had been especially excited when they found what she'd tagged "the lab." It had looked a lot like the other rooms to him, but Daniel had been immediately absorbed in the scrawling on the walls, and the, the... He gave a mental shrug. The countertops, since he couldn't think of a better word , did seem to have more random junk on them. To Carter, of course, it wasn't junk. She was fascinated by finding a lab complete with tools on the benches – ha! that was the word: benches – and kept commenting on how even the arrangement provided clues about this species' thought process.

And then the doors had appeared, closed, and, for all intents and purposes, disappeared. There wasn't even a seam that they could pry at.

Teal'c eyebrows drew together fractionally. "By the time we are trapped as you say, will it not be too late to remind you?"

O'Neill drew in a breath to explain, then stopped with a "hold that thought" look on his face, realizing that Teal'c had suckered him with the "too-literal Jaffa" poker face yet again.

"Jack, I'm sorry that you're bored," Daniel interjected, irritation showing in his voice, "but it's going to take as long as it takes."

"Daniel," the colonel began in a warning tone, "I'm not asking you to entertain me. I'm asking for a status report, and an estimate of our chances of getting out of this room and back to the 'gate before our GDO codes are locked out of the computer. Mostly," he continued, turning slightly to Major Carter, "I want to do something that can help."

"I'm sorry, sir, I do wish you could help, but…" she shrugged, stood, and then stretched her spine until several vertebrae snapped. Several things in O'Neill went "zing" as well. Note to self: do not watch Carter stretch. Even in BDUs.

"…we're stuck." Daniel finished again. Aaaand his scientists were back to finishing each other's sentences. Historically, very good things had come from their freaky science-twin mind melds.

"No dice, huh? So, I ask again, what's the holdup? C'mon, Carter, these things are usually like popcorn to you. A little re-wiring here, a little brilliant rewriting of quantum theory there…"

Carter smiled faintly at his teasing. "That's the problem, sir. Between the two of us, we're having trouble finding the theory, much less rewriting it."

"Brilliantly rewriting, Carter. Brilliantly," he smiled, patting her shoulder. "Those details are important, you know." This time he was rewarded with a smile that actually crinkled the corners of her eyes. That was more like it.

He focused again on Daniel. "So, c'mon, Daniel: give. You're the one who's always telling me how the more languages you learn, the easier they become; something about knowing how the morphines are interdependent, and each piece points to another pheromone that's missing…"

"O-kay," Daniel drawled, blinking in surprise. "Well, aside from the fact that you've got the phoneme and morpheme reversed there, that's pretty much true." He slanted a look at Carter. Her lips curled in a slight smile, and she shook her head slightly. The colonel echoed the motion. Daniel should have realized long since that Jack only put on that bored and distracted look in briefings. It was a great cover for the fact that he remembered everything he wanted to.

"That lecture was a good idea, Daniel," Jack added. "Explaining to the SGC the value of having a linguist, archaeologist, or anthropologist on each team… I think after this even SG-3 will want their own geek." His face turned serious. "Since they can't have ours," he said firmly.

"The 'jar-heads'?" Daniel responded, laughing. "Like that'll ever happen…"

The colonel grinned as his friend used Jack's favorite appellation for the Marines. "Actually, I liked how you compared linguistics to field-stripping and re-assembling a weapon you've never seen before. SG-3 could probably re-assemble their P90s in the dark with one hand, but giving them a new weapon to figure out… That's something they can relate to."

"Thanks, Jack," Daniel replied, pleased and gratified that his friend had approved of his strategy. "I had to do a lot of research into basic firearm principles to break it down sufficiently, but…"

It had worked, Jack reflected. A few days after Daniel's lecture, Jack had actually heard one of the Marines talking about how his linguist needed to find the firing pin to connect to his firing pin spring. He could practically feel respect for the linguistic mission specialists increase on the base. Suddenly, they weren't dead weight, a burden off-world. It had given regular-line military an appreciation for what the "geek department" did on those missions.

What was better, though, was that this little segue was distracting Daniel, and therefore Carter, too, from the problem at hand. They were the brains in the team, no question, but sometimes they could get just a little too focused, not seeing the forest for the trees, running around in circles, playing tag with themselves and not knowing who was it… insert cliche of choice here.

Meanwhile, Daniel was off and babbling. "If we could just get them to understand some of the basic assumptions that we have to deal with…" Distracted Jack had wanted. A new lecture he had not.

"Ah!" the colonel exclaimed, holding a forestalling forefinger in the air. "Ah!" O'Neill waved his hand at his friend in an "enough, enough" gesture. "Yeah, Daniel, sure. But right now we seem to be about a barrel, firing pin, and trigger mechanism short of a working firearm, right?"

"We keep thinking that we've got it, sir," Carter interjected. "We even know where the door controls ought to be, just by process of elimination. But when we go to apply the results of what we've read, well," she gestured to the lab doors which were still solidly bonded together, "it doesn't seem to help."

"So then we have to go back to the writing and try to figure out what we've read wrong," added Daniel, "but we're running out of things that… " he frowned, "…that we can be reading. I mean, I could go back and exchange each 'tan' for 'elephant'…"

"But it doesn't exactly seem to apply to this lab," O'Neill concluded. "I gotcha."

"Yes, sir, and we've tried—"

"Whoa!" he held up a hand to forestall her. "You've tried replacing 'tan' with 'elephant'?" As she opened her mouth to reply, he cut her off. "No, not literally. Major, if I find that any of your equations actually include 'elephant', I'll retire on the spot."

"No sir, of course they don't." Once more she was reluctantly smiling at his ridiculous attempts at humor. "But, physics is like the gun metaphor, too, sir. There are certain things that we just have to have. Some aspects of physics are just non-negotiable."

O'Neill drew his eyebrows together. "Sorry, Carter, but it sounds like something's gotta give, here, and it sounds like the something is the physics."

"Sir, there's no 'give' in physics."

"There's gotta be, Carter. After all, not every gun is designed the same way. There's a whole lotta difference between a musket and a revolver, or a shotgun and a P90."

"Yes, Colonel, but they're all projectile weapons. They all operate on the principle of propelling a metallic object forward by a contained, directed gas explosion," she argued. Her tone was as firm as her belief that there was no room for flexibility in this.

"Okay, Carter," he drawled in his "reasonable man at the end of his patience" voice. "Then you're just going to have to figure out this planet's version of a zatn'ktel."

"Sir, you can't just—"

"Order you to produce a miracle? Yes, Carter, I can. I do. Frequently." He shrugged. "After all, the Asgard never invented projectile weapons."

"Sir, with all due respect, that is a really…" She paused mid-sentence, her expression distant. Daniel reacted to her thoughtful silence as if she had called his name and looked up from his notes. Those two had been working together for too long, O'Neill concluded. Their working interaction was shading eerily toward telepathy.

"Dumb idea?" O'Neill prompted.

"Well, actually," she smiled slightly. "Yes, sir. I would have found a more polite way to phrase it, but…"

"Don't mention it, Carter." He broke into a wide grin. "The Asgard come to me for dumb ideas all the time."

Her eyes grew wide for a moment. "This could work!" Carter grinned back at him. "We've been thinking all along that their technology is based on the same assumptions as ours –

"But the Tollan said–" Daniel began.

"Exactly!" she exclaimed, turning to him. "The Tollan said that the uncertainty principle was based on a basic misunderstanding of physics."

"Y'know, I'm always saying that," O'Neill muttered to Teal'c, not wanting to break Carter's train of and Carter's blue gazes were locked, and Jack was reminded of their first meeting on Abydos, when the two of them had communicated on a level that no one else came even close to understanding. My work here is done, he thought to himself.

"As in, 'Jedenfalls bin ich uberzeugt, dass der nicht wurfelt'," Daniel suggested, "where the word 'der' is—"

"'God does not play dice with the universe'." Carter agreed enthusiastically. "And if that's the case, maybe we just need to start over, without those assumptions."

"God, Carter?" Jack interrupted, disbelief tingeing his voice. That was a sharp left turn away from physics. "When did we start talking about God?"

"It's something Einstein once said sir, to refute Schrodinger. Einstein was one of the best—perhaps the best theoretical physicist of Earth. In fact," she paused thoughtfully, "based on a few things the Tollan let slip, it appears that he may even have been more right than we've thought." She picked up her own notes and began comparing them to the console again. Jack knew from experience that she was about 15 seconds from submerging herself completely in the technology again.

"Yes, but God, Carter?"

"What, sir?" Carter looked as annoyed as a diver halted on her second bounce on the board.

"It's just" he spread his hands in uncertainty, "a theoretical astrophysicist talking about God? It's weird. It's… Help me out here, Daniel."

"Don't look at me, Jack," he responded. The twinkle in his eyes belied his innocent expression. "Anthropologists talk about gods all the time," he said, sitting down and spreading his notes on his knees.

"Oh, sure, all those ghoulds, all claiming to be a god… Ah-hah! " For support for his argument, he turned to the Jaffa at his side. "Teal'c, I'm sure you see what I'm saying."

"Indeed I do not, O'Neill." The barest hint of a smile touched the large man's lips. "MajorCarter and I have discussed both the scientific and personal requirements for the existence of God on several occasions," he continued, inclining his head in the major's direction, "most recently after my Rite of M'al Sharran."

Major Carter looked up from the console she was studying and flashed Teal'c a brief smile before tucking herself back under the bench.

"Oh," O'Neill said, completely nonplussed. His second in command was discussing God with an alien. How had he missed this? Obviously, there wouldn't have been a memo, so he couldn't blame it on his carnivorous in-box, but shouldn't he have known?

Carter was pointing something out to Daniel, who was crossing through several items in his notebook, scribbling down her new definitions. They looked like children sitting under a half-built fort swapping design ideas. If he listened closely, the illusion of children in a hidey-hole was dispelled by the complicated physics terms they tossed back and forth.

He waited until the flood of techno-speak had abated and Carter released Daniel to go back to his writings on the other bits of the lab.

"So, um, Carter," he began. Then he paused as the next question eluded him.

Sam reached a hand up to the bench and curled her fingers over the edge to support herself as she leaned out to look at him. After a moment, apparently deciding that he needed encouragement, Carter prodded him with "Colonel?"

"Uh, this God stuff…" He trailed off again.

"Sir?" He saw her puzzlement before she leaned back under the bench to return to her work.

Did she actually not know what he was getting at? Or was she deliberately being obtuse? He wouldn't put it past her; his major had displayed a perverse sense of humor from time to time. "So, how long have you … been discussing comparative theology with Teal'c? Why didn't I know about this?"

"You didn't ask, sir," she replied in a completely serious tone.

"What is this, 'don't ask, don't tell'?" he muttered irritably. O'Neill crouched down, knees popping in protest, and peered at the underside of the console.

The part of her face that he could see was a shade of pink that was more intense than could be justified by her rewiring work. "Um, in a sense, sir." She slanted a look at him from under the bench.

She hadn't denied it. What was going on? His 2IC was a closet theist and he was the last to know? "Explain, Carter." His fingers found a loose bit of cabling.

"Sir, don't pull on that. I've just got this wired." He pulled his hands back, stuffing them as deeply into his pockets as he could manage. "Well, sir, academia has its own version of 'don't ask, don't tell'." She paused in her explanation, scanning the console above her. "Not so much in the hard sciences, but certainly in the soft sciences or the humanities…" She shook her head slightly, as if coming to a decision. "I guess I'm just not used to being open yet."

"Major, I don't remember anyone telling me about any policy…"

"You wouldn't, sir. You only notice it if you're on the wrong side of it," shesaid wistfully, trailing into silence again.

"So… what? You could come out to Teal'c and not to me?" Illogically, he felt hurt. Of the men on the team, he was the closest to Carter, wasn't he? She was supposed to come to him with these things, not to someone who, no offense, hadn't even lived on this planet for long.

"Maybe part of me thought it would be easier to talk with Teal'c. After all, in the past few years he's come from seeing his 'god' on a daily basis to seeing that Apophis is just a mortal being, to rebelling against him, to searching for something else to believe in…." She shrugged, her hands busily working with the controls. "Maybe because he was so obviously working through all of those things."

He barely had time to register her small sound of contented triumph before he heard the low rumbling of a motor by the door. As he turned to look, a seam appeared in the wall where SG-1 had entered, then became a crack, and then became an open doorway with no sign of the hidden doors.

"Yess!" Carter enthused, jabbing her fists up toward the console. Yep, she was the resident genius, his team's genius, dependable producer of miracles. Maybe it wasn't so surprising that she, in turn, believed in a producer of miracles.

O'Neill grabbed one wrist and and pulled, sliding her out from under the console on the back of her BDUs. "Okay, kids, let's tell our story walking," he said as he pulled Carter to her feet. He took a quick glance around the room to ensure that nothing was left behind. "Let's move out."

Taking his usual position on his team's six on their hike to the 'gate, O'Neill noted that Daniel had moved up to walk with Teal'c. He jogged a few steps and caught up to his second in command.

"So, um, leaving the subject of God for a minute," Jack began. They walked a few paces in silence. "What's this Einstein stuff?"

"Sir?"

"Einstein. As in Albert."

Apparently deciding that he needed encouragement, Carter prodded him with "Colonel?"

"I always figured you for more of a Schrodinger gal. You know, what with the cat and everything…"

"The cat, sir? Schrodinger's cat?"

"No, your cat. Schrodinger." He was getting that obtuse vs runaround vs humor feeling again.

"What about Schrodinger?"

"I guess I just always figured you for a Schrodinger fan. And what with him 'n Albert not agreeing and all, it was weird to hear you quoting Einstein, especially in German."

"Daniel said it in German sir," she corrected, with a beginning of a smile.

And there was that sense of humor. "Yeah, but you knew exactly what he was saying," he accused, jabbing a finger at her.

"Until forty years ago, most scientific papers were written in German, sir."

"Carter, I'm trying to make a point here. Would you quit changing the subject?"

"And what point was that, sir?"

"Why do you know so much about Einstein that you can recognize something he said, in German, 80 zillion light years from home? I thought Schrodinger was your guy."

"Why would you think that, sir?"

"The cat, Carter. The cat. You named the cat—"

"Yes, sir. I named my cat after him." She looked at him quizzically. "My cat. The small, furry, frequently annoying creature that I fed and brushed and cleaned up after and took to the vet to get his t—"

"Whoa! Too much information, Major!" he exclaimed, holding up his hands as if to ward off the t-word. She should know that no guy wanted to hear about—

"—teeth cleaned," she finished.

"Oh," he said. Teeth. Right. Teeth cleaned, not… He levered his derailed train of thought back onto the tracks.

"It's not exactly hero worship to name your cat after someone, sir," she said firmly. "There are the hairballs to consider."

He shuddered theatrically, deciding to leave discussions of cats, German, God, and physics for a later time. "And that is why I'm a dog person, Carter," he offered, and he continued to extoll the virtues of dogs all the way back to the gate.


End file.
